To shift your attention from self-centered desire toward unconditional happiness, you first must learn to see the truth of happiness in yourself. The way to see the truth of happiness inside of you is through the practice of mindfulness and meditation.
The truth of happiness involves knowing that unconditional happiness is natural to you. This truth also involves knowing that if you let go of your attachment to self-centered desires for sense pleasures and the conditional happiness of favorable circumstances, unconditional happiness can enter your life.
To see the truth of happiness in yourself, you need to practice both mindfulness and meditation. These are perhaps the most important practices in finding it. Seeing weakens the hold that your self-centered desires have on your attention. It also shows you where to focus your attention to experience happiness.
Mindfulness (Learning to See)
To see how your self-centered desires make you unhappy, you need to be mindful of yourself. To be mindful is to see the way the world is for you now. It is to be aware of this moment. If you see the world as it is, you do not trap your attention in your mind’s image of the way it is. You also do not trap your mind in your beliefs about the way it is.
You spend much of your time in your mind, looking at your ideas about the world and your memories of the world. To be mindful is to pull your attention out of your mind and observe the world directly.
If you can be mindful of yourself and what you want, you may see that what you want will, more often than not, make you unhappy and perpetually dissatisfied. You may also see that getting what you want may make you happy for a time, but that it isn’t long before you move on to dissatisfaction and new desires.
Bill is eight years old and desperately wants a particular toy for Christmas. He has seen it advertised and can imagine himself happily playing with it. It is December 5, and he spends much of his time thinking about the toy. He is unhappy about having to wait. He has plenty of other toys, but he wants this one.
The magical day finally arrives, and Bill has his toy. For a few weeks, he plays exclusively with this toy. He can hardly wait to get up in the morning and enjoy it. Then he is visiting a friend’s house, and his friend, Sammy, has a different, more interesting toy. Beholding the wonders of this new toy, Bill’s dream toy begins to pale. Desire is beginning to grow for a toy like that of his friend.
Self-centered desires often lead to dissatisfaction with the way the world is, and the result is unhappiness. Satisfaction of major desires can bring temporary sense pleasure and conditional happiness, but, even for little tykes like Bill, they are soon replaced with new desires and new unhappiness. And the cycle repeats itself, over and over. To weaken the hold of self-centered desires, you have to see the futility. You have to see that the cycle will never lead to lasting happiness. You have to see the truth of this in yourself.
Meditation
I devote later chapters to meditation, so here I will not go into the specifics of how, when, and where to meditate. Here, we examine the goals of meditation, and the way it fits within what we are looking at in this chapter..
Like mindfulness, meditation enables you to see. As you practice meditation, you can see the futility of desire. More importantly, in meditation you can learn to turn your attention to your eventual goal: unconditional happiness.
Meditation is nothing mysterious. It is merely the practice of focusing your attention. It is the practice of thinking what you want to think. People often think of meditation as mysterious and otherworldly. It is not.
As you will see in the chapters on meditation, you can sit while meditating, with eyes open or closed; you can meditate while walking around, and you can meditate while lying down. The only constant is your purpose in meditation, which is to focus your attention and keep it focused on your object of meditation.
Your object of meditation can be anything. For example, you can meditate on your breath or a physical object such as a flower. You can also meditate on a particular thought, such as happiness or compassion.
In meditation, you learn to choose to focus your attention and let other thoughts that come into your mind pass by, like drifting clouds. You learn to choose what to focus on, so your attention is not at the mercy of your reactions to the world, and your self-centered desires. Learning to control your attention and choose your thoughts opens for you the space to choose. Without this space to choose, you just react.
In everyday life, thoughts may come up and capture your attention without you being aware that it is happening. These thoughts can ruin your day. In meditation, you learn to find space in which to choose how you’ll respond to the thoughts that come up. You can think of meditation as the practice of the power to choose what to think about and what to turn your attention to.
Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, said:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Thoughts connected to your self-centered desires are powerful and pervasive. They are like addictions. These thoughts express longings for pleasurable sensations; the need to please (stroke and inflate) your self-image; and the need to avoid unpleasant things. Each little desire is not bad in itself. Rather, it is the pattern of automatically giving in to them that can ruin your life. Without learning to choose what to think about, you are at their mercy.
When you learn to choose what you’ll think about, you can learn to focus your attention away from what you think you want and more towards the spaciousness of unconditional happiness. At first, the feeling of unconditional happiness can be subtle. However, in meditation you can nurture this feeling so that it grows to fill your entire awareness.
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